4 papers in the library · publishing 1994
May 25, 1994 Robert M. Torrance
The medium's personal transformation by possession trance is a temporary change without major consequence (in most instances) for daily life. Her self-perception as the passive implement of a power beyond her control reduces, moreover, the extent to which she actively participates in shaping its responses (thus in shaping the future), and increases her tendency to fall back on cultural...
May 25, 1994 Robert M. Torrance
Ecstatic or visionary shamanism is not a discrete phenomenon but the form of the experience of religion in tribes in which the questing impulse, common in some measure to all, finds fullest expression. It customarily coexists with calendar rites, sacrifice, divination, or spirit possession, and even when the shaman has been displaced by priestly officiants, he or she may reappear on the fringes...
May 25, 1994 Robert M. Torrance
The literature of spirit possession repeatedly emphasizes the contrast between the convulsive spasms of the disoriented novice and the controlled trances of the authoritative medium who is no longer, in the Afro-Brazilian distinction, an undisciplined child, but a mother or father of the god. The initial seizure is not always a call to the medium's vocation. Unexpected encounters with the wild...
May 25, 1994 Robert M. Torrance
This chapter states that with the gradual spread of Lamaist Buddhism northward to Mongolia and Siberia, not only those who adopted (and adapted) the new religion, but others who presumably retained ancestral shaman practices, were deeply influenced by it. Given the wide diffusion of a clearly ancient shamanic complex from Lapland eastward to Greenland (hence far beyond Buddhist influences),...